Pines charters, Broward School Board in tug-of-war for tax money

PEMBROKE PINES — The 5,600 students who attend the Pembroke Pines Charter schools are no different than their peers at Chapel Trail Elementary or West Broward High.

They're all public school students. Some juggle Advanced Placement classes and varsity sports. They all take the dreaded statewide standardized tests.

The only difference is that the money their parents pay in property taxes to the Broward County School Board never makes it back to their schools.

That's the crux of a four-year battle between the city-run Pembroke Pines Charter School system and the Broward County School Board. The decision to share those tax dollars could be decided by the state Legislature in March.

The city is proposing a bill that would require local school districts to share their property tax dollars with municipally-run charter schools. Without that money, Pines said it would deplete its reserves in three years and may have to shut down.

"We're at a critical level; we can't go any further," Pembroke Pines Commissioner Jay Schwartz said at a town hall meeting packed with charter school parents. "We're backed up into a corner."

But the school board says it barely has enough money to make basic repairs to its traditional schools, let alone share that money with a charter system that "needs to learn to better manage its money."

The bill would cost the Broward School District approximately $4.5 million.

"We don't have sufficient funds; we have schools in desperate need for repair," said School Board member Patti Good, whose daughter attends the Pembroke Pines Charter High School. "Pines has to realize that they have to do more with less."

Pines officials argue that they have managed the schools' money well. To prove it, they have an A-rated school system with a 96.4 percent graduation rate.

Jean McIntyre, a parent of a 10th-grader at Pembroke Pines Charter High, said the Pines charter schools have more than proven their value to Broward County.

"All around education is terribly underfunded," she said. "I don't see how we let one or the other go."

Charters and traditional schools each receive $6,386 per student a year to pay for teachers and operating costs. But per student funding has dropped nearly $1,000since 2008 — a loss that hit the charters and traditional schools equally statewide.

Charter and traditional schools get their capital money to pay for items such as building maintenance from different funds.

Charters receive money from public education outlay dollars, a tax on telephone lines and wireless communication. In contrast, school districts get their capital dollars from property taxes. But the Legislature decreased the amount school districts could collect in 2010.

School boards are allowed to share tax dollars with charter schools, but according to a state survey, only three school districts in the state do so.

"The biggest issue is how the majority party and governor's office immediately cut $1.3 billion out of the [2011] school budget," said state Rep. Richard Stark, D-Weston. "We need more money for all schools."

The Broward School Board said if the Legislature allows the district to increase property tax rates, it will consider sharing some of that money with the Pines system.

"We've expressed a willingness to work together," Good said. "If we're able to work together and restore our millage to where it once was, we're willing to share it with Pines."

Gov. Rick Scott recently offered a glimmer of hope, proposing an increase in per-student funding and making education a legislative priority.

Stark said he would support Pines' bill requiring a school district to share a proportionate amount of its tax dollars with city-run charters. The bill would affect only a small segment of charters — there are only five city-run charter systems, including Pines, in the state.

Only one of those, the Cape Coral Charter Schools, is close in size and academic success to the Pines system.

Cape Coral School Administrator Lee Bush said he took money from teacher salaries and textbooks to pay off the school's debt. Cape Coral Charters, which has 3,000 students, lobbied the state for more money the past three years but was unsuccessful.

Both the Pines and Cape Coral systems say the lack of money stems from a growing number of charter schools dipping into the same pot of capital money.

Since 1996, the number of charter schools in Florida has grown to 570 — all of which are sharing the same capital dollars.

Because of that, the amount of money Pines receives has decreased by 41 percent since 2001.

"We've been reaching into reserves since the decline of the market," Schwartz said. "We have made more rabbits jump out of a hat in order to make this work. All of us agree that the state of Florida needs to do more for education."